Essays by leading historians and literary scholars investigate the role of religion in shaping political, social, and literary forms from the Reformation to the Civil Wars. Individual essays discuss the relationship between religion and culture, and explore how religion informs some of the central texts of English Renaissance literature, including work by Foxe, Hooker, Shakespeare, Donne, Lanyer, and Milton. The collection demonstrates the massive centrality of religion to early modern constructions of gender, subjectivity, and nationhood.

Essays by leading historians and literary scholars investigate the role of religion in shaping political, social, and literary forms from the Reformation to the Civil Wars. Individual essays discuss the relationship between religion and culture, and explore how religion informs some of the central texts of English Renaissance literature, including work by Foxe, Hooker, Shakespeare, Donne, Lanyer, and Milton. The collection demonstrates the massive centrality of religion to early modern constructions of gender, subjectivity, and nationhood.

Religion in Tudor England offers readers the prose and the poetry, the theology and the spirituality, the prayers and the polemics, of one of the most important epochs in the making of modern Christianity. Beginning with King Henry VII, the Tudors' reign included the break with Rome and the rise of English Protestantism, a series of religiously inspired revolts, the burnings of nearly three hundred Protestants for heresy under Queen Mary, the executions of scores of Catholics for treason under Queen Elizabeth, and the emergence of the Puritan challenge to the Church of England. Moreover, the...